


The Horizonless Field

by disenchanted



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Accidental Incest, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Anglo-Irish Relations, Class Issues, Father/Son Incest, M/M, Power Imbalance, Rank Difference, schrodinger's incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-05
Updated: 2019-03-05
Packaged: 2019-11-12 12:38:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18011054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/pseuds/disenchanted
Summary: Crozier learns about Hickey's origins.





	The Horizonless Field

On a winter night, after they had fucked, Crozier kept Hickey in his bed and told him about himself when he was Hickey’s age, or thereabouts. He rounded the Cape of Good Hope as a mate on the sloop Doterel; then England, for longer than he’d have liked; then to the Arctic with Parry. Hickey took each piece he was offered hungrily. He was like a street dog offered the scraps the poorest humans would not eat. He touched Crozier’s shoulder, his stomach, and listened to him with bright, intelligent eyes.

Crozier thought he had underestimated him, this street-dog of a caulker’s mate, who’d cleaned the shite of a better-kept dog because he thought it would help him along. Well, so it had: along to here, where Crozier had licence to nudge him into a kiss now and again. Crozier told him, ‘I was twenty-six when I first saw the Arctic. You were twenty-four. Well, when I did it, you were two. A babe in arms, almost. And you were in Limerick.’

‘No, I was in Manchester by then,’ said Hickey lightly. ‘I was got in Liverpool, and she had me in Limerick. Near Limerick. She only went back to where she was from just before I was born.’

‘Why write Limerick, then, instead of Manchester?’

At that the intelligence seemed to go out of Hickey. It was only much later that Crozier would realise this, too, was a trick. He looked at Hickey then and felt that he was vulnerable, boyish, dully contemplative, like a schoolboy dreaming: suddenly a human and not a beast.

Resting his cheek on Crozier’s shoulder, Hickey said, ‘It’s where my mother’s from. Where my father’s from doesn’t matter; I never knew him, he never knew me.’

Christ! thought Crozier, what a pitiful thing. He had learnt, since joining the Navy, to hate the house in Banbridge where he was raised, but there had always been wood in the fireplaces and a book to read. He wasn’t the hungry, puny child of a poor Irishwoman who’d only needed money for a bed for the night. ‘Better to have played your game,’ he had told Hickey once, but he couldn’t have done: he didn’t know the rules of Hickey’s game. He was lucky not to know.

‘You need to go,’ he said. He tried to lift himself up to watch Hickey go, to ensure that he did go, but he was drunker than he’d thought, and sank back down.

Hickey must have been used to being told to leave. He was in his slops and shirt already, passing silently out into the captain’s cabin. Crozier had the sense by the way he moved that he was one who had been trained more in confidence than in stealth.

 

* * *

 

Two weeks later Crozier brought Hickey to his bed-cabin again. He did it like he always did; he invented some errand for Jopson to run, which Jopson understood should take at least an hour, and then invented some ridiculous task for Hickey to complete, something he was only handing off to Hickey because Jopson was already occupied and Hickey had the most duty owing. Grimly, as he undressed Hickey and worked him up to a stand, Crozier thought of how much easier it had been since the lashing to arrange these meetings: he could command Hickey do anything, and command him directly, because Hickey had made himself a target.

If fucking Crozier put Hickey in any greater pain, he did not show it. Doubtless he had felt worse. He was a splendid bugger; he put Crozier on his hands and knees and fucked him from behind, so that Crozier could imagine he was someone else. But Crozier only thought of Hickey: he spent with Hickey’s face in his mind’s eye, remembering the time Hickey brought him off with his mouth and pulled back just as he was spending, streaking his cheek and chin with it. As Hickey withdrew Crozier wondered what he owed him for this, whether it was more than a cup or two of whisky.

Impudently Hickey turned Crozier onto his back and put his stiff prick in Crozier’s hand. He curled up against Crozier, kissed his neck, moved bodily along with Crozier’s strokes. He had an appetite for this, too: for receiving Crozier’s attentions, presenting his own pleasure to Crozier. Afterwards, sated, he lay in Crozier’s arms and stroked his own soft cock, and Crozier’s stomach and chest. He let Crozier kiss the top of his head.

When Crozier was very near to asking him to go, Hickey said, without lifting his head from Crozier’s shoulder: ‘She said my father was a sailor. A mate, in fact. And he was Irish too. I don’t think she knew exactly who my father was; she must have picked the nicest of the bunch, or the one she could remember. But I suppose I could have an Irish mother and an Irish father, and be just as Irish as you.’

‘You wouldn’t want to be,’ said Crozier, and laughed at his own self-pity.

It wasn’t until much later that he understood, or allowed himself to understand, what Hickey had said. And then—what then? Erebus and Terror were still caught in the ice; he was still the leader of the expedition, this search for fucking nowhere. He was responsible for all of these men, not just one, and they were dying. He could do nothing else but what he could do.

 

* * *

 

On the upper deck, during the middle watch of another dark winter night, Crozier smoked his pipe and watched the shimmering aurora. Hickey, who had been assigned to patrol the deck between two and four bells, lowered his rifle and came to stand beside him, not closely enough that they might accidentally touch but more closely than a caulker's mate ought to have stood beside his captain. His breath looked like his spirit hanging suspended in the cold, still air.

Hickey peered keenly at Crozier from within his protective swaddle of cap and Welsh wig and scarf and greatcoat. His eyelashes were covered in ice; the warmth of Crozier’s pipe-smoke had protected his. Crozier thought, _This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine._

‘Does it matter?’ asked Hickey, pausing before adding a conscious, ironical ‘sir’. ‘Would it have mattered, if you had known?’

‘You’ll never know who your father is,’ said Crozier. ‘Your mother told you a story about someone she remembered.’

He didn’t remember the woman, only that there was one: some small, pale-skinned body that for some price—he didn’t know what—he had been allowed to fuck. He had not been in the habit of sentimentality then; this was before Sophia, even before the Arctic. When he fucked Hickey’s mother he had not yet seen these lights. If he had learned her name he had forgotten it since. He would not ask Hickey what it was. Where did the name ‘Hickey’ come from, wondered Crozier, if not the man’s father?

‘That she did,’ said Hickey. He readjusted his rifle, stamped out his cold feet, and nodded a curt, cheeky farewell before proceeding aft. As the darkness absorbed him Crozier thought of how small Hickey was, how narrow his shoulders.

 

* * *

 

Crozier could have wept: he was drunk enough for it. Instead he took Hickey’s head in his hands and kissed him deeply, the way he had imagined he would kiss Sophia someday, Sophia who would be the mother of his sons.

There was no question of that now. They had failed to find the passage. If Fairholme’s party had reached Fort Resolution, if help was on its way, they would return to England with nothing. If not, they would have to walk the eight hundred miles themselves, and return to England with nothing. Less than nothing: blood on their hands, debts to be paid. Crozier would not be sent north again. He mourned for himself as he mourned for John Franklin and Graham Gore and the rest, and knew that he was selfish for it, and allowed himself that selfishness because he did not think he could have hated himself more.

‘There are worse things,’ said Hickey, smiling. His gaze was steady and deep: Crozier saw in it that Hickey would do anything, absolutely anything, if he felt he had reason to.

Hickey knelt in front of Crozier. Unbuttoning Crozier’s trousers, he found Crozier hard, and took him into his mouth. He was a decent cock-sucker when he wanted to be; he knew how to hollow his cheeks and suck hard, how to use his tongue on the head, how to get a prick down his throat. He did it with his eyes closed and a solemn crease between his brows. There had been other men in Hickey’s mouth before Crozier, men who had paid for it.

Crozier was so dizzy he was near to being sick, and put his fingers in Hickey’s hair to keep himself upright. He thought of the ritual and routine to which he had devoted himself, and how little it meant in the face of fate, which in the end he found to be nothing more than his own vices unfurled to their greatest extent. His desires now were broader and wilder than they had ever been; his desires were the only thing that moved him. His knees were weak, his fingers ached, his head was struck through with blinding pain. Yet he went on taking this, claiming it for himself, because the world had offered him nothing else, neither glory nor love.

The lamp on the wall was flickering: Crozier could see it even through his eyelids. He opened his eyes and let the light stain his vision purple, and through that veil looked down at Hickey, who looked up at him.

 

* * *

 


End file.
